Giant Spiders



Trigger warning: This post contains details about giant spiders that may or may not frequent our casita. If you are planning to visit us in La Josefina and if hearing about such frightening creatures would make you change your travel plans, we recommend you skip this post until at least 24 hours after you have booked your plane tickets.
                                                    

I am not going to lie, we have some giant spiders here. And by giant, I mean HUGE. Conjure up the image of the largest spider you have seen crawling on the ground or working on a web in a corner of your house. Pick a big one. Now take that guy's size and QUADRUPLE it (It may be cheating if you live in the tropics). Perhaps sextuple it. Our spiders are immense: average leg-span, from the tip of one toe of its front eight legs across the body of the spider and down a back toe, runs over 3 1/2 inches. If you drew a circle around it, said circle would have a diameter measuring close to four inches. Some are definitely bigger.

The giant spiders are frequently hairy. As such, we have had several discussions about what makes a tarantula a tarantula and not a spider, and this is what I found: it has nothing to do with hair. All tarantulas have hair; but some spiders do too. An important differentiating characteristic is that tarantulas are hunters and do not make webs like spiders; instead they wrap their silk around their prey after they have pounced on them. Also, spiders have six spinnerets; tarantulas just two. Tarantulas have downward facing parallel fangs with which they can only bite top down -- think vampires -- whereas spiders have much more flexible fangs that face each other and can swing side to side. Dillon and Paul are certain that at least one of the twelve or so giant spiders we have encountered was a tarantula, but I am not convinced. They all look pretty much the same to me. Big brown guys.

Unfortunately, many of our overgrown arachnid friends seem happy to share our house with us, despite multiple efforts -- mostly Paul's -- to eradicate them. When we were first painting and cleaning the house a couple of months ago, he found a BIG mama with an egg sac and thought maybe he got them at the source. Nope, definitely not the case.

The good news is that the giant spiders always appear as solitary visitors, often in the evening; they aren't particularly interested in us, and they seem harmless. I am fairly certain they don't bite or sting. They mostly show up high on the walls of the bedrooms where the tin roof meets the cement blocks. The other good news is that our chicken, Sherman, loves spider legs as a crunchy snack.

For a short time, Brynna asked that we not kill any animals, including giant spiders. Instead she asked us to remove them non-violently because she felt kinship with all creatures and cared about them. She has since reneged on that kinship and is perfectly fine with us using the "daddy technique" to get the giant spiders. Daddy technique involves some furniture rearrangement, the broom, a bit of yelling, and a strong piñata-like whack -- hopefully just one big one. Paul is quite skilled.

But tonight, one landed (no idea where it came from) on my leg in the middle of the living room while I was sitting minding my own business petting the bunny. It definitely freaked me out for a split second. I used the daddy technique, whacking it hard with the end of the broom, several times to ensure its demise before sweeping it outside. And I was proud of my success, if not a bit rattled by the close encounter.

While I am writing, Paul is building lofted beds for the boys. Dillon isn't sure whether to be more concerned about our bat friend who lives in the rafters and chirps every now and then to remind us of his presence or the giant spiders. He pulled out an image from these ridiculously funny Pangato comic books, which we have in Spanish as part of our high brow literary collection and showed me an image of one of the characters, Buamp, with spiders crawling into her mouth as she lays in her bed.

"This," he says with a grin. "This is going to be us."

PS. Years ago, I wrote a medical blog post about "spider bites" and how spiders get a bad rap. Spiders frequently take the blame for being the causative agent of MRSA skin infections in emergency rooms and urgent care clinics all over the country. For the record, spiders don't generally bite humans, like hardly ever. They also are an extremely rare cause of human skin infections. This doesn't mean they don't totally freak us out.

PPS. As I was editing the final text of this post, Dillon was working at the kitchen table on a math lesson on proportional relationships, and he suddenly shouted, "Giant, spider!" I thought he was crying wolf, but alas, I was wrong. Paul is away for the day, so I did
 my duty with lots of encouragement from Dillon. "One more whack, mom. Whack it again; it's still moving!"

 


 

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